Sunday, May 18, 2014

Speaker for the Dead, chapter sixteen, part two, in which science is useless before the might of the fence

(Content: colonialism, incest, genocide. Fun content: CAN WE FIX IT? No, we can't, because this book was published 28 years ago and the damage is done and it somehow won the Hugo and the Nebula.)

Speaker for the Dead:. p. 289--311

Y'all will recall that we left Miro at the fence, which he can't turn off anymore, hooting for the Little Ones and hoping that narrative fiat is on his side. It is, obviously, and so a passel of them arrive--"Arrow,Human, Mandachuva, Leaf-eater, Cups"--stomping through the grass instead of moving silently like they do in the forest. They stay still and absolutely silent, which Miro translates as anxious body language, and he says he can't come to them anymore because he got caught. He blames Ender, but the Little Ones report that the hive queen said it was the satellites, and suggest what they might have spotted: the hunt, the amaranth crops, the cabra-shearing, orrrrr maybe the three hundred and twenty baby Little Ones born since the first amaranth harvest.

Once again, I'm having some trouble with timelines. (Bonzooooooo--) Libo is the one who gave them the amaranth (I don't know if we've had that stated outright yet, but it's why they honored/murdered him), meaning that was four years ago, and we also know that was the first time they shared human technology (spurred by the famine). All the other tech that Miro and Ouanda have shared with them has to have been in those intervening four years. Obviously it takes some time to go from conception to adult, but we've already got Arrow and Calendar and Cups running around, meaning none of them can be older than four years. Supposedly the mass birthing started as soon as possible after Libo's death, but somehow no one has noticed the massive upswing in population, not Miro, not Ouanda, and most questionably not Jane, who literally satellite-scoured the entire planet like four days ago and reported to Ender that "every forest like this one carries just about all the population that a hunter-gatherer culture can sustain" back in chapter six. Possible conclusions: either the masses of new births actually got delayed a few years, or the Little Ones are actively hiding most of their new generation, or this alien baby boom didn't exist four chapters ago because it wasn't relevant to the plot yet. Place your bets!

Also, as an aside, I hadn't considered until now that this timeline means that Libo gave the Little Ones new tech, the Little Ones inexplicably eviscerated him for it, and Miro and Ouanda responded by massively ramping up the technology-sharing. Because that makes sense both from an emotional point of view ("My name is Ouanda Figueira. You killed my father. Prepare to be taught how to bake and sculpt basic pottery".) and from a survival point of view ("Huh, the boss gave them agriculture and they murdered him; I wonder what they'll do if we give them ranged weapons.").

Where were we? Right, savage primitives. Miro demands to know what's with the baby boom and the Little Ones explain that, with their new amazing food source, they can hugely increase their tribe size, conquer all the surrounding tribes, plant mothertrees in their forests, and TAKE OVER THE WORLD. Miro is a professional, so he doesn't protest their megalomania; he just asks where the new generation is, and Human says they're busy learning with the other brother-houses. Which is again rubbish, since we were told back in chapter six again that all the males in the forest lived together in one big log house. (Although, if the satellites can see through the trees well enough to figure that out, why can't they see the Wives' settlement? And if they can't see the Wives or these other possible brother-houses, how can they be estimating the populations in any of the forests anywhere on the planet?)

Miro gets around to explaining that he's to be taken offworld. The Little Ones (who have been assuring him that Ender will fix everything) offer to hide him, and he points out the impassable agony fence, they tell him to chew grass.

Finally Mandachuva tore off a blade of capim near the ground, folded it carefully into a thick wad, and put it in his mouth to chew it. He say down after a while. The others began teasing him, poking him with their fingers, pinching him. He showed no sign of noticing. [....] Mandachuva stood up, a bit shaky for a moment. Then he ran at the fence and scrambled to the top, flipped over, and landed on all fours on the same side as Miro.

It turns out the Little Ones have been hopping over the fence at night and strolling around town for years now. Not going to lie, I cracked up a little at this part. I mean, it makes no sense or difference--they haven't learned anything in town that impacts the plot, and they've never been spotted because the Starways Panopticon doesn't believe in security cameras--but the level of "Oh, yeah, by the way, your technology is less than useless" is hilarious in its excess.

Miro says the grass is an anesthetic, and they correct him, saying they feel the pain--worse than dying--but "it's happening to your animal self. But your tree self doesn't care. It makes you be your tree self." Miro recalls Libo's corpse with a mass of grass in its mouth. Mandachuva says he'll go find Ouanda, since he's been in the village a few dozen times now and knows where everyone lives. Which of course means that there's no one to pinch Miro and help him test his pain sensitivity as he starts chewing grass. Well:

He pinched himself. As the piggies said, he felt the pain, but he didn't cared. All he cared about was that this was a way out, a way to stay on Lusitania. To stay, perhaps, with Ouanda.

Yes, dear reader, Our Hero is desperately seeking a way to take his half-sister away into the forest to "raise a family of humans who had completely new values, learned from the piggies". You may commence retching; I'll still be here when you're done.

He ran at the fence and seized it with both hands. The pain was no less than before, but now he didn't care, he scrambled up to the top. But with each new handhold the pain grew more intense, and he began to care, he began to care very much about the pain, he began to realize that the capim had no anesthetic effect on him at all, but by this time he was already at the top of the fence. [...] Momentum carried him above the top and as he balanced there his head passed through the vertical field of the fence.

Mandachuva returns in time to haul himself up the fence and shove Miro over to the other side. They argue about planting him immediately before he dies, but Human insists the pain is just an illusion and he'll recover, though he shows no signs. Mandachuva runs off again to find Ouanda.

We cut back to Ender meeting with all the important people. Novinha arrives:

He noticed that her hair was down and windblown, and for the first time since he came to Lusitania, Ender saw in her face a clear image of the girl who in her anguish had summoned him less than two weeks, more than twenty years ago.

So... wait, she's finally free and at ease, and so she looks more than ever like the isolated, self-loathing, desperate heretic teenager acting out of self-sabotaging panic?

Ender explains that he's gathered them to decide whether to rebel against the congressional order. They say they have no choice, but Ender says all of congress' power and threats depends on the ansible. THE BISHOP says they can't cut off the ansible or they'd lose contact with the Vatican, but Ender (without asking her first, obvs), reveals Jane's power:

"I have a friend whose control over ansible communications among all the Hundred Worlds is complete--and completely unsuspected [....] And she has told me that when I ask her to, she can make it seem to all the framlings that we here on Lusitania have cut off our ansible connection. [....] In sohrt, we will have eyes and they will be blind."

The mayor calls this out as the act of rebellion/war that it would be considered, but Ender can intuit that she likes the idea even as she tries to resist it, which is also creepy as hell--her mouth says no but her eyes say insurrection. THE BISHOP of course continues to argue, saying that evacuation may suck:

"But a law was broken, and the penalty must be paid."

"What if the law was based on a misunderstanding, and the penalty is far out of proportion to the sin?"

Lest we lose track, the law here was based on the possibility that introducing human culture and technology to the Little Ones might cause them harm, and about ten pages ago we were informed that the Little Ones currently intend to use their new tech to wage a war of conquest across their entire planet. That's not a misunderstanding, that's prescient. The penalty is foolish (as if intervening in twenty years will help), but Ender's counterargument boils down to "I can fix it", which is only going to get you an acquittal if your judge is The Honorable Mr Justice Bob the Builder.

Ender says that if they do what congress says, then they are approving of the law and the punishment*, and they shouldn't do that until they know everything. There's some more ego-stroking; Ender says they all have to decide together,"the civil and religious and intellectual leadership of Lusitania", or they can't rebel, and the Bishop calls Ender a fourth power, "as dangerous as Satan", yet submitting to them. Ender says he wants to be one of them.

"As a speaker for the dead?" asked the Bishop.

"As Andrew Wiggin. I have some other skills that might be useful. Particularly if you rebel. And I have other work to do that can't be done if humans are taken from Lusitania."

First: skills useful for rebellion? Like, what, tactically? Ender doesn't have a fleet to destroy the rest of humanity with. Second: I'm like 150% sure that Ender's work restoring the hive queen would actually be a jillion times easier if he didn't have to worry about humans next door.

Ender recaps for them: he went into the woods, the Little Ones have read HQ&H and the Bible, they want to travel the galaxy and fear human colonisation, humans only advanced so far because we found formic technology and ran with it and now we fear that the Little Ones will do the same if we give them anything. Libo started meddling because the xenologers have never thought the Little Ones were just savages (Ender says this after literally accusing Miro and Ouanda of thinking of the Little Ones as beastly primitives two chapters ago), and they killed him "exactly the way they put to death their own most honored citizens" (I'm not sure what he's basing that conclusion on). Then it's time for more theology:

"If you really believed that someone was perfect in heart, bishop, so righteous that to live another day could only cause them to be less perfect, then wouldn't it be a good thing for them if they were killed and taken directly into heaven?"

I would love to dive into this, except that is' one of Fred Clark's best-tread wheelhouses. Suffice to say that this logic only works if you first assume that the sole point is to go to heaven as assuredly and quickly as possible, and not, for example, to do anything in particular on Earth with your perfection and holiness. Screw the plebes, you got yours and if they deserved your help they should have offered you paradise first. (Spoiler: we'll never find out if or how Little Ones die of old age, or what the consequences are for their tree phase.)

Anyway, Ender recaps the tree-splitting ritual, and explains that the Little Ones and the trees are the same species now, despite this being practically impossible.

Novinha interrupts the hubbub to point out that, if congress copied all their files, then they've got her parents' research on Descolada now. (Apparently no one in the last thirty years has bothered to research any aspect of this ultimate plague, because this is the galaxy of terrible science.) This means they won't evacuate the planet after all, because while the Descolada is controlled, it's still lying dormant in their bodies.

Bosquinha was appalled. "So anywhere we go--"

"We can trigger the complete destruction of the biosphere."

"And you kept this a secret?" asked Dom Cristão.

"There was no need to tell it. No one had ever left Lusitania, and no one was planning to go."

I can only say 'worst scientists ever' so many times.

But with Ela and Ender's discoveries, Novinha has figured out Pipo's last discovery, that Descolada is part of the reproductive process, and thus she's 'figured out' that every animal on the planet has a plant counterpart. The river grass hatches watersnakes. The capim fertilises the cabra. No, don't ask how she made that leap based on no more evidence than we've been given. She is senior scientist and her intuition is fact.

The Bishop says this must mean they won't evacuate the colony after all, and Ye Must Love Reapers says they'll be put under quarantine and so they have no reason to submit to the congressional order anyway. The Bishop finally points out that if Little Ones pose the same threat to the galaxy, and so their dreams of spaceflight must be equally impossible. Ela thinks they could learn to fully control it one day, but Ender says congress will see this as another formic war, only this time the retroactive tragedy is averted: they'll obliterate Milagre and all of the Little Ones who've had human contact, and keep a compassionate blockade over the planet, no xenocide needed.

"You were there," said the Bishop. "You were there the first time, weren't you. When the buggers were destroyed."

I kind of love the way the Bishop just keeps grabbing historical facts out of intuition in order to make the situation sound more serious. HEY READERS, REMEMBER HOW IMPORTANT ENDER IS?

Ouanda bursts in, Bosquinha tries to casually arrest her, and she blurts out that Miro's gone over the fence. They scramble to call Dr Navio, but Ouanda says they can't get through the fence unless they shut it off, and congress has that control now. Mandachuva strolls in and asks if this means they should eviscerate plant Miro, earning a chorus of horror. Ender says they need to cut the ansibles immediately, and prods the Bishop with scriptures about leaving the ninety-nine safe sheep to save the lost one. As they leave:

"Tell me, Speaker [...] if we rebelled against Starways Congress, would all the rules about contact with the piggies be ended?"

"I hope so," said Ender. [....]

"Then," said the Bishop, "we'd be able to teach the gospel of Jesus Christ to the Little Ones, wouldn't we? There'd be no rule against it."

First priority: convert the heathens. I feel like there are a lot of other theological questions to be addressed here first, such as "why" and "are we sure God wants humans to convert aliens" and "have you ever heard of the crusades", but given how we've had the Bishop characterised so far, I suppose his top concern is building his own authority by getting more laypeople under him. I'm not a fan of proselytising for a variety of reasons, though I do figure it should be allowed (all else equal), but maybe we could spare like five minutes to think about power differentials and coercion and unequal access to information.

When they arrive at the fence, Novinha has already tried to climb it and Ela is holding her back from a second attempt. Ela recaps the recap, that Miro tried and failed to numb himself with capim. Ender talks to human, and says he'll bring down the fence and rebel against congress and bring them the hive queen, but only if they let him meet with the Wives to write a treaty first. He gets a consensus, although Leaf-eater snarks at Human and Novinha is horrified that they're putting everyone in danger of evisceration like Pipo and Libo, and the Bishop's agreement is contigent on getting to preach to the Little Ones.

"Jane," murmured Ender.

"That's why I love you," said Jane. "You can do anything, as long as I set up the circumstances just right."

Oh my god Jane Ender hasn't done anything. Everyone reported the facts to each other: Ela's research, Novinha's conclusions, Miro and Ouanda's observation of the tree ritual, Reaper's understanding of how congress would react, the Bishop's desire to convert the Little Ones, all due to the crisis that you personally engineered. I've played visual novels that were more demanding than Ender's role in this.

Jane 'cuts' the ansible, Ender climbs the fence and hauls Miro back over just as the doctor arrives, and Ouanda follows him over, saying she'll need his help if he's meeting with the Wives. Ela does the same, and they take off into the woods.

Now, obviously they were going to rebel anyway, but:

1) Literally the only way anyone can think of to cross the agony fence is to declare planetary rebellion? You till fields! You mine! You work steel! You're supposedly advanced scientists! Run a tractor through it, dynamite it, swing an axe through its power cables, literally any of the many techniques humanity can bring to bear against fence technology!

2) How the hell does this agony fence work? It's a physical fence, clambered over like it's chain link, but its agony field not only radiates from the metal but in a vertical field projected upwards? Does this not result in hundreds of bird corpses piling up on either side year after year as the more reckless of each generation misjudge how high the field is projected, or try to land on it? Is there no safety suit or lead blanket that could be thrown over the top to make a safe passage? Does the agony field pierce literally every known form of matter?

3) Why a fence? Ostensibly it's to keep out the Little Ones, and they must not be allowed to see human technology (remember, Pipo was forbidden to use a ballpoint pen in their sight) but Miro and the Little Ones can see each other and converse through it, and it's structured so that an immune creature (or a robot, perhaps, given the AIs that humanity should be programming) can easily get handholds in the links? You know what would have been literally a billion times more effective, if you were going to use a huge power-draining fence anyway? A forcefield, like the ones used in Battle School. Impassable by any force we're aware of save the Doctor Device, absolutely opaque, absolutely frictionless, and cheap enough to operate that they're used as doors on a space station. Harder to climb over, but no chance for colossal neural damage in case of an accident! (Miro's been damaged because he went over the top, but would the same thing not have happened if he tripped and fell face-first against the side of the fence one day?)

Next week: even when women are infertile, they're characterised as loud harridans with full responsibility for raising children.

---

*This is one of Card's things, the same principle that inspired him to say he was compelled to try to destroy any government that would dare attempt to enforce anything as society-ruining as same-sex marriage. As yet, I haven't heard about him getting arrested for plotting his own insurrection, so I have to assume that he's either a hypocrite or he's changed his mind and he fully endorses marriage equality. NO, CARD, PICK A SIDE OF MY FALSE DICHOTOMY AND LIKE IT.

Yeah it's odd. If the fence was built and maintained by the people of the colony, then someone would know how to un-maintain it. I guess this means the fence is space-tech, brought here by the original colonization ship, and they had to leave out some other things to make room -- such as the fully automated steel smelters that don't kill people.

Totally. She called a Speaker for the Dead with absolutely no caveat of "by the way you'll need to speak from orbit or else live here forever." Not Cool.

And how does this apply to the Hive Queen? Will the Formics re-conquer the whole universe by just showing up with ultra-deadly plague? Or will they stay confined to this planet? We already know the Little Ones want space travel, so... are they aware they carry Deadly Space Plague or do they just not care?

When she called him, she was only 13 and may not have known all of this. But she probably should have mentioned it some time during the THIRTY YEARS since then. And your point about the aliens traveling is right on. Ender is insane for thinking of establishing the Hive Queen on this planet.

"You can do anything, as long as I set up the circumstances just right."So, if we get put it a little more bluntly, Jane is saying"You can do anything, as long as I do it for you."I didn't think I'd see the moment when OSC admitted repository of infinite wisdom, infinite importance, infinite empathy, etc. etc. ad nauseum Ender Wiggins was useless and worthless. Wonder if he realized the implications of that line?

Actually, aren't there dozens of people who fell down on the job here? The planet's under quarantine. Isn't that the first thing anyone going to look to travel there is going to learn? Isn't the congress going to demand you sign a form indicating you know it's quarantined and you'll never be able to leave before they'll let you go? Looks like the governments and people who work in travel are all as stupid and incompetent as all the scientists in this universe.

I thought it wasn't under quarantine because Novinha never told anyone? Because she decided it didn't matter, for some reason, because no one (except, I don't know, THAT GUY SHE INVITED TO COME HERE) was ever going to come to/leave Lusitania? I have no idea exactly why she thought that reasoning made sense, or that that was her call to make. Apparently scientists in the future are not required to undergo ethics training.

But they all have to take supplements in order to stay alive, right? Wasn't that in one of the earlier chapters. That means that they all knew the Descolada was a continuing threat. How could the planet not be under quarantine? And how could the supplements have been developed without knowing that the Descolada was still in everyone?

Miro says the grass is an anesthetic, and they correct him, saying they feel the pain--worse than dying--but "it's happening to your animal self. But your tree self doesn't care. It makes you be your tree self."

Okay, Miro's a scientist, right? He knows that the Little Ones are physiologically extremely different from humans. Like not in the same kingdom. And the Little Ones couldn't possibly make it more clear that it works based on their physiology. I know these are the worst scientists ever, but this has to max out the KWSE meter. This is like thinking you can breathe underwater because fish can!

When Novinha says that they'll never evacuate the planet because they're all carriers, the Bishop says (roughly, don't have the book in front of me) "The additive isn't expensive. But I could see that they might quarantine us." Which to me implies that everyone thought the additive kept the Descolada at bay, so that additive + quarantine would be enough to prevent an epidemic. What no one knows is that (a) the additive does not make the Descolada less contagious, and (b) the Descolada can infect literally all life forms, so just keeping them away from other people is not enough unless you also keep them away from all plants, microorganisms, whatever. This is where the "complete destruction of the biosphere" comes in. It is made pretty clear that no one but Novinha knew this until about 10 minutes ago (nobody on Lusitania, and definitely not Congress). WHY she never told anyone is still murky.

Since I sit across from a Portuguese speaker I asked him to translate Descolada and he drew a blank. He looked it up on the web and saw "unstuck" or "unglued" and nodded as if that made sense. He said he wasn't used to hearing it with a feminine ending before. If it was a male noun it would have been descolado. He says that diseases generally are considered feminine(!) so Card presumably got the ending right for Descolada.

How did anyone do science on anything on the planet without finding out her secret about the Descolada being in everything?

Also, if no one has come to Lusitania since the original colonization and no one has left, those mysterious factories must be intended for the colony...which still doesn't make any sense. What in the galaxy would a tiny colony need multiple factories for? How big is the area agony fenced off, since, presumably the colony, factories, mine(s?), fields, and all must be inside it.

Except, no, or the agony field area is GIANT. I looked back and the Mayor went and got Ender at wherever the automated shuttle (why was it still working if it hasn't been used in decades? And if it has been...either people are still coming unaware that they'll be infected or the Descolada has already spread to the galaxy at large) and aircarred him to the town. Which begs the question of why the automated shuttle doesn't take people straight to the town. How did original colonization work? "Well, the shuttle just lands us somewhere random, then we search out a suitable townsite and leave the shuttle where it landed just in case we ever need it."

Okay, the Descolada is beginning to really, really piss me off. First, there is absolutely NO justification for allowing medical research on a dangerous contagious disease to be labeled "secret" and accessible to ONE person because that person is the genetic offspring of the original researchers. Just for starters, let's get it out of the way that that makes no sense and is deeply irresponsible from a public health AND scientific discovery point of view.

Second, the possibility of Descolada being spread to other worlds via the Lusitanians is only occurring to anyone *now*? No one, not one single person, in at least three full generations of colonists, has had any reason to leave? No One? Really? And again, in three full generations, on the only planet on the known world with a sentient indigenous species, not one single person before Ender ever came for a visit? *Really* Card?

Is the planet under quarantine or not? If so, why is there a conflict in this book at all? If not, why not? The Descolada just springs up when Card needs something to needlessly complicate events, and disappears just as quickly when it would interfere with his *other* ass-pull plot-complicators (Sending the only people in the universe with any contact with the only known sentient race on a one-way time-dilated trip to another world to address violations of Congressional directives that may or may not have happened? Totally plausible!)

You keep assuring us that the plot is now appearing, but all I see are totally-out-of-nowhere complications to the massive Idiot Ball that is Starways Congress policy vis a vis Little Ones. Who. Cares.

I don't know why I'm still trying to pretend this makes any sense, because it obviously doesn't.

How did anyone do science on anything on the planet without finding out her secret about the Descolada being in everything?On Lusitania, Novinha & Ela are the only biologists, so no one else would notice. Off Lusitania... I think that no one cares, for whatever reason? Isn't there some line about how there are thousands of anthropologists making careers out of following the xenologers but no one pays attention to whatever Novinha's doing? Also she keeps all her data private anyway? (Because the best thing to do, when your community has a chronic plague that could wipe them out horribly if it develops resistance to your treatment, is to make sure that you and your teenage daughter are the only people in the universe that know anything about it.)

Maybe the imports/exports are happening in some sort of automated way? Because I think they are pretty explicit about the fact that no one has ever visited or left Lusitania (this is why there are no motels or anything for Ender to stay at, for example).

My standards are relative. People are making decisions, getting injured, and declaring rebellion, which is to me a breath of fresh air after a couple hundred pages of Ender asking questions about things that have already happened and having someone hand him the answers.

And if she can selectively edit ansible communications so that it only looks cut off, why doesn’t she just block Congress from messing with the colony’s computers?

I think that's what she's actually doing, but 'cut the ansible' sounds a lot more dramatic than 'stop actively enabling all of the inconvenient aspects of ansible controls'. I would hazard a guess that in the original plan, they were going to cut the ansible, but then Card realised he still wanted to keep them in contact with the outside world and Jane.

I suppose having the Lusitanians actually vote on this is out of the question? I mean, there’s not many of them, it wouldn’t take very long.

I don't get the impression that anyone in the galaxy thinks much of democracy. The mayor is appointed by congress for life, after all.

If the fence is indestructible and can only be controlled by Congress, wouldn’t cutting the ansible just make it impossible for anyone to turn it off? This only works if the fence is governed by some bizarre dead-man’s timer that deactivates it unless Congress keeps IMing “Stay live…stay live….no, seriously, stay live...” every five seconds.

I think the implication is that once Jane 'cuts' the ansible, it will default to local control or something? I'm not clear on why Jane, who literally is the ansibles, can't just switch it off and keep it off at will, rather than following congressional commands.

Or just fly over it. You have an orbital shuttle, which Ender arrived on, and which is apparently still operational.

They…huh? I mean, I think you’re correct, but…huh? If the ships in Ender’s fleet had nuke-bouncing forcefields, how did they ever get destroyed in battles?

I assume that some level of kinetic force is capable of breaking the forcefields (although Ender's Game makes reference to the I.F. 'shields' that prevent nuclear war on Earth from ever happening again), but we don't actually get any information on what kinds of non-Doctor weapons are used in space wars. The only reason we even know anything about the Ecstatic Shield (that it's completely opaque, for example) is so Rackham can explain that it's useless against Doctor Device.

It turns out the Little Ones have been hopping over the fence at night and strolling around town for years now. ... I mean, it makes no sense or difference--they haven't learned anything in town that impacts the plot...

Miro says the grass is an anesthetic, and they correct him, saying they feel the pain--worse than dying--but "it's happening to your animal self. But your tree self doesn't care. It makes you be your tree self." Miro recalls Libo's corpse with a mass of grass in its mouth. Mandachuva says he'll go find Ouanda, since he's been in the village a few dozen times now and knows where everyone lives.

...

They argue about planting him immediately before he dies...

Mandachuva strolls in and asks if this means they should eviscerate plant Miro, earning a chorus of horror.

Oh my god. So, the Little Ones have been traipsing through human town for years, witnessing everyone's lives and even learning where they each live, and in all this time they have learned... nothing. These idiot aliens still think that humans turn into plants?? We already knew that over the past decades, nobody checked up on Pipo & Libo's corpses and noticed that they're not growing into trees, and now we learn that the Little Ones can go around witnessing human behavior and their private lives and still not understand that they are not the same species as the Little Ones themselves.

Card has written an alien species that's dumber than the Psychlos. Of course, he also writes humans that are dumber than Psychlos, so that's not wholly surprising.

Not to mention that no other animal species on Lusitania turns into a plant when they die. And that they learned years ago that Pipo was Libo's father, despite obviously not being a tree. And that they were given both the Bible and the Hegemon to read, which describe human lives in some detail. I think it's just cognitive dissonance at this point. They can't not know.

This gets the barest acknowledgement--they read the New Testament, read about Jesus coming back, the promised afterlife, and concluded that humans have a 'third life' much like their treeform. They also think that Pipo and Libo were robbed of their 'third life' because they were uprooted before they could sprout properly (they don't know why the humans would do something so pointlessly cruel, but humans are weird). As you point out, they've got years of village recon showing there are no forests inside the fence, and there was a pre-chapter exchange a while back in which Miro confirms that humans bury their dead and that they never dig them up again, such that, in the Little One's phrasing, their dead 'don't do them any good'.

Miro gets around to explaining that he's to be taken offworld. The Little Ones (who have been assuring him that Ender will fix everything) offer to hide him, and he points out the impassable agony fence, they tell him to chew grass.

Waaaaait a second... two chapters ago, the Little Ones found out that tears mean pain, and realized that Pipo and Libo were in pain when being vivisected. In fact, it was Mandachuva who remembered that Pipo and Libo were crying when they died. And in this chapter, Miro reflects that Libo's corpse had "a mass of grass in its mouth". So the application of the grass did not prevent the humans from shedding tears of pain. It may have dulled the pain but they still cried because being stabbed to death is pretty tear-worthy, pain or no, but the Little Ones were beside themselves with grief because they came to the conclusion that the humans were suffering. So as far as they know, the grass has no analgesic effect on humans, but they tell him to chew it anyway.

Depizan, you may be right. Maybe the Little Ones are just trolling the humans.

Oh, goodness, what a CF. Especially with how the humans seem so very willing to do whatever someone else says - clearly, the dim view of Catholicism extends to "the people are sheep and have no intentions or independent will", because the plot has so far completely hinged on nobody doing anything proactively. Except maybe Jane.

Found this great quote from Octavia Butler the other day: "When I was young, a lot of people wrote about going to another world and finding either little green men or little brown men, and they were always less in some way. They were a little sly, or a little like “the natives” in a very bad, old movie. And I thought, “No way. Apart from all these human beings populating the galaxy, this is really offensive garbage."

She was talking about a novel she wrote to address those ideas, "Survivor", that she later repudiated and wouldn't allow to be re-printed. It was about a human colony landing on a world with an alien race and began interbreeding with them. Somehow I think that, despite being disowned by its author, it still beats all the hell out of this crap.

I wish we’d seen more of this—the xenologers giving them more and more shit, and the Little Ones just ramping up their honor killings in response.And have the killings themed after the tech they're given for. Libo gives them agriculture, he gets something planted in him. Miro gives them leatherworking, he gets skinned. Ouanda gives them the internal combustion engine, she gets...ground into fuel, maybe?

It seems unfair to diss aliens for their poor skills at reading Earth religious texts, but how do you read the New Testament and not notice that a) Jesus was supposed to be highly unusual in coming back to life, b) he was crucified rather than being vivisected and staked to the ground, and c) he didn't come back to life as a tree?

I think that's what she's actually doing, but 'cut the ansible' sounds a lot more dramatic than 'stop actively enabling all of the inconvenient aspects of ansible controls'.

And justifies all of this “The Important People must now decide Lusitania’s fate” business. Because otherwise Jane could just turn off the fence and keep the tractors running and everyone in the colony could get on with their lives while the mayor drafted a “C’mon guys, you don’t need to make our crap scientists actually leave the planet” letter to Congress, and how much fun would that be?

I don't get the impression that anyone in the galaxy thinks much of democracy. The mayor is appointed by congress for life, after all.

Or maybe 99.9% of the galaxy’s population thinks democracy would be fantastic but it’s only the 00.1% percent whose opinion matters, ha ha irony.

Of course, nobody appoints a mayor for life (Marion Barry aside). Even a dictator doesn’t appoint a mayor for life, because a dictator doesn’t want to encourage a crop of smaller dictators. Bosquinha should, at minimum, have an understudy or an apprentice vice-mayor or something in case she suddenly drops dead or develops space-Alzheimer's or goes power-mad.

I think the implication is that once Jane 'cuts' the ansible, it will default to local control or something?

So the fence is designed to be exclusively controllable by Congress unless vandalized by locals, in which case the vandals can do whatever they want with it. Yay.

Yeah, but Card’s shuttle is piloted by computer, and can take off and land (and refuel?) on its own at some podunk unstaffed airfield. So, sure, maybe as awkward as a private propeller plane, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t fly over the fence and bring it down on the grassland outside in a thrilling and hair-raising landing that would constitute something actually being accomplished in this damn story. You could even have a non-protagonist turn out to be a talented amateur pilot or something, to emphasize that Milagre is populated by actual people and not just cardboard cutouts with nametags! Madness!

The only reason we even know anything about the Ecstatic Shield (that it's completely opaque, for example) is so Rackham can explain that it's useless against Doctor Device.

So I don’t actually want to complain about the forcefields being opaque—that’s an unusual touch of realism, since forcefields really should block light if they block everything else as well. But how do the ship pilots see out? Is this why Ender won all his battles, because the ships are all flying blindly around until they happen to collide at a high enough speed to bust their shields? Is Ender just really good at space marbles?

Also, is it explained why the shields are, er, Ecstatic? Are they powered by masturbation? They are, aren’t they.

So, sure, maybe as awkward as a private propeller plane, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t fly over the fence and bring it down on the grassland outside in a thrilling and hair-raising landing that would constitute something actually being accomplished in this damn story. You could even have a non-protagonist turn out to be a talented amateur pilot or something, to emphasize that Milagre is populated by actual people and not just cardboard cutouts with nametags! Madness!

I'm still a fan of the 'open the gate' solution. I mean, I'd be delighted if it turned out that 'cutting' the ansible meant the fence lost power but the gate was permanently sealed, making it the only un-vandalisable part of the fence, but in a couple of chapters they're going to walk through it all the time. So presumably the only reason they didn't do that was because Miro walked well away from the gate before making his run, and they decided that throwing his electro-gibbled form over the top was way easier than carefully carrying him a whole fifty metres back the other way.

how do the ship pilots see out? Is this why Ender won all his battles, because the ships are all flying blindly around until they happen to collide at a high enough speed to bust their shields? Is Ender just really good at space marbles?

This is another excellent question to which no answers will be given. The Elizabeth Moon solution, of course, would be that ships constantly rotate their shields from on to off, allowing them roughly full visibility and at least partial protection at all times. My solution might be that there are scout ships which beam sensor information back to the cloaked vessels at all times, and these scout ships similarly take turns being shielded or not shielded, so that they have backups in case the enemy takes out one of them and the fleet still wants to be able to see. Card's solution is "Don't think about that, think about Ender's noble angst".

Although the literal meaning of 'ecstatic' is 'completely and totally involved with one single thing', so that does suggest Card intended for the point of the shield to be 'amazing defence, but you can't do anything else while it's up'. In which case ships presumably fly around with no shields until they detect incoming fire, and then they tank up until the threat has passed. His SF ideas (the Park shift, the Doctor Device) are really so, so much better than his moral ideas.

Yessssss I saw that too. It's like Card wrote the chapters independently of each other and out of order. And didn't keep any notes, just ran with whatever he thought had happened. The names of people and objects are the same but the thing itself is a little bit (or a lot) different.

I think it's possible that the Battle School force field technology was kept so secret that it is now lost. From Ender's Game I got the impression that it was based on formic technology and humans never quite understood it in the first place. (I can't point at a specific passage for that though)

Oddly enough, forcefields are one of the only technologies that humans came up with on our own--in the Doctor Device speech, Rackham mentions that, while humanity stole a bunch of sweet alien tech like the ansibles and artificial gravity in the previous wars, the formics learned from us as well, which is why they now have the Ecstatic Shield.

"Obviously it takes some time to go from conception to adult, but we've already got Arrow and Calendar and Cups running around, meaning none of them can be older than four years"

Not necessarily. They might have taken their names when becoming adults. Some kind of rite of passage seems reasonable, especially if adulthood is the start of the "second life". This leaves open the possibility that the baby boomers are all still children. Or larvae or sprouts or whatever.

There is the One Doctor In Town, Dr Navio, who arrives to treat Miro in this chapter, but he's already been solidly characterised as physically and mentally lazy (no ultra-busy country doctors charging across pastures to treat cabra-trampled farmers for this book), and he has apparently never had any involvement in Descolada research. Because obviously once you do the theoretical research on a disease, there's no need for clinical input to actually develop a treatment.

Physically and mentally lazy is not what I'd expect from a colony world doctor. Even in a colony that refuses to make any sense.

Beyond that, though, people have been born since Novinha's parents died. I don't know how Dr. Navio can realize that newborn babies require the supplement* without realizing that they, too, catch the Descolada at birth. Even if they believe it somehow makes them non-contagious, they've got to know that it a) still is contagious from some source and b) every single one of them has it.

If they think it keeps people from catching the Descolada, then - since it's got an infection rate of 100%, right - how did they explain the supplement saving infected people?

How do they think this "supplement" works? They have to have some understanding (correct or not). Did they give it to Ender when he landed? If so, why? If not, why hasn't he caught the Descolada?

For that matter, how in hell does the Descolada even work!? If I'm understanding its virulence correctly, they'd have all been infected the moment they landed. How'd the colony last long enough to develop the supplement? Or is it only that everyone has it because they've continued to live in a place teaming with it, and the infection rate under "normal" circumstances wouldn't be so high...giving people time as the colony slowly all caught it.

I feel like medicine and disease can safely be added to the things Card doesn't understand. (Is there anything not on that list?) Or does it make slightly more sense if one reads the book?

*You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

If they think it keeps people from catching the Descolada, then - since it's got an infection rate of 100%, right - how did they explain the supplement saving infected people?

I'm not sure the supplement did save 'infected' people. Basically, you get it by eating local foods/drinking water with local microbes in it, so it was in everyone pretty quickly, but it took several years/decades for it to mutate into a form that could start affecting humans. It didn't start affecting everyone at once (for whatever reason--spread of mutated forms, a lot like a regular plague that way) and thus the people who hadn't started sprouting extra limbs could take the Colador and be safe, while anyone who had started to show symptoms (like Novinha's parents) was still screwed.

Perhaps Card should have written it that way? The grief-stricken Novinha calls for a speaker without thinking the consequences through; then, after five days, she is horrified to realize the speaker will be infected with Descolada, and tries to cancel. When it develops that it’s already too late, she is racked with guilt; for the next twenty years, she deals with her guilt by trying to push the whole subject out of her mind, refusing to even talk about the Descolada to anyone.

Sure, but the Little Ones are the ones who think they know what they're looking for and not finding, whereas the humans are failing to spot something that they don't know they should look for. The Little Ones have apparently had years to investigate this, both directly and by questioning the xenologers, and have made enough progress to determine that humans get buried. So the best we can say is that they're comparable to human ineptitude in xenology.

The Little Ones definitely exhibit more basic curiosity than the humans do, and they've got an advantage because they know they're ignorant (or they know it once it's been proven to them). Hence the Ender explainathon can take effect.

Or they might just be taking them on as use names in addition to their birth names. I've known a lot of people coming from other countries with names that cause difficulties for them locally (being mispronounced, being treated like crap, being passed over in applications, etc) who take on a use name that is common to this area. Maybe they all got sick of the humans screwing up their names and just said, "Fine, whatever. My name is Arrow. At least you know how to spell it."

The science in "Survivor" is not good - this small group of humans is sent off to be a colony on a world that MIRACULOUSLY has a human-friendly biosphere, and the local dominant species are MIRACULOUSLY similar to humans - they're basically "humans in fuzzy suits" style of aliens.

...like the atevi. (Except that Cherryh didn't make them interbreed with humans.)

On the other hand, if you accept the basic flaw in sending out a colony too small for survival, the weirdness of their luck in having a human-friendly biosphere, and handwave the two-species-interbreeding as a plot thing, well: the basic story is good skiffy stuff. Alanna is your classic Octavia E. Butler hero - she's tall, not-considered-pretty, mixed-race, and can take care of herself: the interactions between the locals and the colonisers, and the local politics (a world is a big place) - it's a good yarn. I enjoyed it when I was a teenager, I enjoyed it when re-reading a few years ago.

"MY NAME IS THE NIGHT'S SORROWFUL GRAIL OF PAIN. I CHOSE THAT TITLE UPON MY AGONIZING PUPATION WHICH WAS NOT LIKE ANY PUPATION THAT HAS EVER OCCURRED BEFORE, CERTAINLY NOT LIKE THAT OF MY LAME BOURGEOIS RUNNING-BUSH PARENTS. I AM THE GRAIL. THE GRAIL OF PAIN."

"I'm sorry, that was a lot of grunting and gesturing at the sky but I think I caught the word "taças" in the middle somewhere. So we'll say your name is 'Cup'? 'Cups'?"

Nonsense. A character like that would compete with Ender! We can't have that. Only he can have the most agonizing anything ever....You know, I'm totally okay with Ender having all of the agonizing things ever. Hem.

Somewhere in the vast black of space, there drifts a great disc of pure diamond, turned deadly by eternal washes of cosmic rays, and in the unknowably distant past, a warning was burnt into its faces: FOR EVERY NARCISSIST IGNORED, THE WIGGIN GROWS STRONGER.

. The Elizabeth Moon solution, of course, would be that ships constantly rotate their shields from on to off, allowing them roughly full visibility and at least partial protection at all times.

Which could lead to an interesting arms race in random number generators, as ships try to crack their opponents' timing patterns, so they can change direction while the opponent's shield is up and land shots while it's down.

My solution might be that there are scout ships which beam sensor information back to the cloaked vessels at all times

Yeah, that sounds like the most reasonable option. Of course, if the shields block everything they ought to block sensor information transmissions as well...but maybe those can be sent over the ansible,* which has the best chance of being the one thing the shields can't block.

Speaking of which, if the ansibles can get past the shields, and they're somehow reverse-engineered from formic telepathy, could you use them to launch mental assaults on the crew of shielded formic vessels? Not that it matters, since the Doctor Device is already the Weapon That Solves All Problems.

*at VAST EXPENSE, or possibly ZERO EXPENSE, depending on the current price of skrika futures and the phase of the nearest moon

In which case ships presumably fly around with no shields until they detect incoming fire, and then they tank up until the threat has passed.

Which would imply that incoming fire is significantly sub-lightspeed, so ships have time to detect it and react. So I guess they'd have to be using big slow missiles, not lasers or camouflaged shells. Even so, a turtled ship could easily be placed under constant fire and it'd be effectively helpless, since it wouldn't know when it could safely drop shields.

His SF ideas (the Park shift, the Doctor Device) are really so, so much better than his moral ideas.

"Lazy and absurd" is preferable to "atrocious," I suppose. (I suspect that George Lucas secretly hired Card to write these things, so Star Wars' space battles would seem realistic by comparison.)

"Lazy and absurd" is preferable to "atrocious," I suppose.Having determined that Ender is an evil wizard and all of the science in these books is as hard as a warm gelatin sculpture in a wind tunnel, I'll take what I can get from SF concepts that at least have interesting consequences, even if we never see or explore any of them in this book. My standards are so low now.

"It should be studied. I should have been studying it all these years."

And once again, Card admits that he's been writing an Idiot Plot for the entire book. YES, you should have been studying them! Why in all of space weren't you!? There are valid reasons not to study the Little Ones, but you could have studied any other species and learned all of this and you just didn't bother--because that would've circumvented the plot Card wanted to write.

People were kept from being aware of the danger that they - and any children they might have - were in, and were kept from being aware that they could never leave the planet without endangering, oh, pretty much the entire galaxy (they transport it to wherever they go, infecting other people, who then take it elsewhere, etc), somehow no one was interested in the fact that this planet had some horrible disease (logically the planet should've been quarantined the moment the Descolada was discovered), and no one followed up on what had been done to save the colony, no one did any science on the alien species of the planet, despite the planet being very different from any other (or so it's kind of implied) that humans had settled.

Where was she getting the plants to genetically engineer? What was the colony living on in the meantime? Why was no one else working on the food problem? Why was no one else studying, oh, anything on the damn planet? And this is not normally how science is done. Very, very, very rarely do you have one person working on a project totally alone. Here, everyone is a lone supergenius, or else does nothing. There would've been scientists wanting to read about her plant engineering, there would've been people wanting to come to the only planet with sapient life discovered since the Formics, there are about nine million problems with this entire set up. "There was no need to tell it" my ass.

It occurs to me... the scientists couldn't bring any tech with them, not even pens or whatever. Shouldn't they have gone naked then? Who says that the aliens have woven cloth, or zippers/buttons/snaps? Or whatever.

I don't think we get any indication that the Little Ones ever wear clothes, but no, the xenologers just aren't allowed to wear 'complicated' clothes, like zippers or buttons. Simple shirt and pants, I guess? (Or a robe, for even more simplicity, but I guess they thought that was too far.) As noted, despite what Pipo writes early on, the rules really are designed specifically to make his work unproductive, and not at all to avoid contaminating the Little Ones' culture.

Which begs the question: Why? Why send people to study the Little Ones, but hamper them with rules designed to keep them from succeeding at their studies? I still don't get why the colony was allowed, or not pulled the moment it turned out there was a sapient species already on the planet. (Or, given the general attitudes of the humans in this galaxy, why the colony wasn't obliterated from space.)

Card would have us believe that the system is designed to monitor the Little Ones, keep them from progressing too fast, and draw out the process as long as possible so that humanity doesn't have to deal with another alien species roaming the galaxy. As I think the blog has shown to far, it would be more accurate to say the system is designed to give us hints at the science mystery while always providing an excuse for why no one else ever tries to solve it. (It doesn't do that either, of course, since Miro and Ouanda have been actively contravening the technology rules for years now but they still stick to their 'no direct questions' rule for no justified reason.)

It gets worse! (Some spoilers to follow.) The descolada eventually develops resistance to the additive, so Novinha and Ela have to keep developing new versions (at a faster and faster pace as the decolada “learns” their methods). Even if no one else in the universe wants to study this for some reason, every school child on Lusitania should be pushed into studying advanced biology so that they can work in the lab. But no, Novinha and Ela will probably be able to handle all the virology/genetically engineered potatoes/basic science research on every species on the planet, no problem.

It's Vogon Poetry: the Series. The books should have little warning stickers: Publisher not responsible if your brain explodes from severe overdose of anti-logic, or if it pops out your ear and runs away to Hoboken.

Once again, I'd ask where the editor was, but I'm fairly certain they got about three chapters in and began drinking heavily. I suppose we can't really blame Card for not understanding what they meant by "Audghfkdldkfjhdfjk *sob*"